Today's Stories

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

Weekend Edition
February 27 - March 1, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Is it even remotely possible that senior officials in the Bush administration - maybe even at least one of the top two - will be the target of public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States? From dismissal only a few months ago by leading Democrats in Washington as unthinkable, the glorious possibility can at least be glimpsed in the middle distance, like the mountain lion I saw here a decade ago in the twilight, loping off into the brush.

For the perps, overseas is already dangerous terrain. George W Bush's first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, fled Paris a couple of years ago to avoid having to honor a subpoena from French investigators, replicating a similarly hasty exit from the French jurisdiction by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

For almost the entire four years of Bush's second term, one of the main campaigns of the left was to pressure the Democratic leadership to support impeachment proceedings against the president and vice-president. The posture of your CounterPunch editors was always that impeachment was never on the cards and consumed far too much energy, not to mention expectation. We always said that the realistic line should be to ensure that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, Yoo and the others should spend the rest of their lives on the Most Wanted lists, afeared to answer a knock on the hotel room door in any foreign capital, lest it presage a lawyer with a subpoena or a pair of handcuffs.

Following regime change in Washington in January,  the official tone in Washington remained anchored in  “bygones be bygones” mode.

Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont has talked about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he claimed would instruct future transgressors that  torture is just plain wrong and contrary to international  laws and covenants. Maybe Leahy’s hogging of the torture-probe spotlight  irked House Majority leader, Nancy Pelosi.  Last Wednesday, February 25, Pelosi was interviewed for an hour  by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who asked the top House Democrat what her reaction would be to any charges levelled at the Republicans who've now retreated to private life and are writing their memoirs.

Maddow: "If the US Justice Department's inspector general report that comes out this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level on issues like torture, or wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these other issues..."

Pelosi: "No one is above the law. I think I have said that."

In active English, Pelosi's pious phraseology about no one being "above the law" translates into something like: "These guys are out of power and their popularity ratings are in the toilet so now  it's safe at least to talk about turning the dogs on them."

And since Pelosi controls the assignment of hearings to relevant committees in the House, this means that she could give the green light to House Justice Committee chairman John Conyers to organize hearings. Equipped with a capable director and subpoena power - that is, the ability to compel testimony and documents under the threat of criminal sanction - such hearings could form the first of what the left regards as necessary show trials, both of the criminals in Washington who trashed the Constitution and the criminals on Wall Street who looted the economy.

Officials of an avowedly outlaw regime would be in the dock for flouting the US constitution and international law regarding treatment of 'enemy combatants' and torture of captives either directly by US personnel or indirectly, by kidnapping those suspected of terrorism and handing them over to allies to be tormented in prisons in Egypt or Thailand or eastern Europe.

There is already a significant trail of evidence that links torture in the US prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib directly to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as Andrew Cockburn described here on this website nearly two years ago. According to a sworn statement by Air Force Lt General Randall Schmidt, appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI officials that there had been widespread abuse at Guantanamo, Rumsfeld gave verbal and subsequently written approval to torture suspects, using the notorious techniques of isolation, sleep deprivation and psychic degradation.

When the micro-managing defense secretary was apprised by Schmidt of his own documented instructions to the torturers in Guantanamo, Rumsfeld said in apparent surprise: "Did [I] say 'put a bra and panties on this guy's head and make him dance with another man?'"

In the case of Abu Ghraib, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators.

It was a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld, authorising techniques such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld's handwriting, was the terse instruction, "Make sure this happens!!"

In contrast to Pelosi's maybe temporarily toughening posture, over at the White House Obama has been sticking  to the line that partisan witch hunts are part of the old politics of divisiveness and that it's time to move on

Obama's Justice Department lawyers have told U.S. judges in explicit terms  that the new administration will not be moving on from Bush's policies on the legal status of renditions and of supposed enemy combatants. Lawyers from Holder’s DoJ have emphasized to judges that they, like DoJ lawyers instructed by Gonzales and Mukasey, contend that captives seized by the US government and conveyed to secret prisons to be tortured have no standing in US courts and the Obama regime has no legal obligations to defend or even admit its actions in any US courtroom.   “Enemy combatants” will not be afforded international legal protections, whether on the field of battle in Afghanistan or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere in the world.

This explicit continuity with the lawless Bush years has deeply disappointed many of Obama's supporters, though the current levels of Obama-worship are reminiscent of similar levels of uncritical adulation back in the Camelot era of John F. Kennedy. 

Perhaps the need to apply some salve to the disappointment impelled Pelosi to take the harder stand she adopted last Wednesday. It’s hard to believe that the San Francisco millionairess actually wants to see pitiless investigation in a House committee of torture policies she effectively condoned in the Bush years. But here is a rich opportunity for the left. Obama’s pledges in the campaign  to run a lawful government were very explicit.

Last Tuesday he declared to the joint session of Congress that “I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight.” Of course this is an outrageous lie.  In all likelihood a CIA officer or agent is torturing a captive in Afghanistan even as I write these lines. More generally, the US does torture, the same way it always has, furnishing its kidnapped victims to subcontractors in secret prisons. As the doors of Guantanamo close, there are many unknown facilities around the world supervised by the CIA, running ful blast, with zero accountability.

If Pelosi feels it politically meet to open the door a crack, we should welcome the opportunity. We’re looking here at a campaign for retribution that will last well beyond an Obama presidency and which may indeed include Obama himself among its targets, if he pursues his present policies.

Photo by Alexander Cockburn.

Footnote: I took this photos of tortured people at the Museum of the City of Lima and of the Inquisition a couple of weeks ago. CounterPunchers should start building similar museums right here, right now.

Last Call!

There’s still just a couple of days in which  to subscribe and get our current crackerjack newsletter. Eamonn Fingleton has a terrific piece on Bernie Madoff, describing in compelling detail how the press dropped the ball on this apex Wall Street scamster who looted $50 billion. The Wall Street Journal  actually had the story in 2005, having been handed his 19-page report by Harry Markopolos, accurately outlining Madoff’s criminal enterprise. The SEC had turned its face to the wall, prompted to inaction by internal inertia and possible corruption, also by powerful forces in Congress.  A story in the Journal, using Markopolos’ research, would have blown Madoff sky-high and saved billions for the people he bilked, the not-so-rich as well as the plutocrats. But the Journal did nothing and Fingleton describes how and why it took that course. The New York Times displayed similarly apathy. Amid  the death throes of the old corporate press, Fingleton pitilessly excavates one of its greatest failures.  The smoking gun was placed in their newsroom  in-trays and they carefully looked the other way.

Also in this new edition of our newsletter Paul Craig Roberts concludes his three-part series on economics,  -- the shortest, sharpest guide ever written. Let me quote a couple of paragraphs:

Modern economic theory is based on “empty-world” economics. But, in fact, today the world is full. In a “full world,” the fish catch is limited by the remaining population of fish, not by the number of fishing boats, which are man-made capital in excess supply. Oil energy is limited by geological deposits, not by the drilling and pumping capacity of man-made capital. In national income accounting, the use of man-made capital is depreciated, but the use of nature’s capital has no cost. Therefore, the using up of natural capital always results in economic growth.

For example, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico from fertilizer runoff from chemical fertilizer farming are not counted as a cost against the increase in agricultural output from chemical farming. The brown clouds that reduce light over large areas of Asia are not included as costs in the production of energy from coal. Economists continue to assume that the only limits to growth are labor, man-made capital, and consumer demand. In fact, the critical limit is ecological.

Get our newsletter to read Roberts’ outline of full-world economics.

Subscribe Now!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont